Inherently Human: Volume 32

Snapshots of law, gender and sexuality news from the past couple of weeks.

‘Equal Recognition’ campaign launched in Edinburgh; hope for a ‘third gender’ within the UK?

Oriana Frame, Durham University.

On the 1^st of November 2014, the Equal Recognition campaign was launched in Edinburgh. The campaign, pioneered by The Scottish Transgender Alliance alongside the Equality Network, has vocalised the notion that Scotland, along with the rest of the United Kingdom, is falling behind countries such as India, Denmark, Bangladesh and Germany who have already legally recognised a ‘third’ non-binary gender.

Read Full Post »

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ A Challenge to Our Binary World

On 5th November, Gender and Law at Durham had a showing of ‘Intersexion’. Gita Keshava, a 2nd year LLB student at Durham Law School reviews it here.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” The first question uttered when a baby is born and sometimes even beforehand. What if you are neither entirely a girl nor a boy? The biological male-female binary divide is so engrained in our society that the idea of any ambiguity has been hidden from view to the point that many people do not know that it even exists.

Intersex is an umbrella term used when a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not fit into the typically distinct categories of male or female. It encompasses over thirty different conditions that originate prenatally, in which a person’s biological sex may be in between that of male or female, or it may appear to be male but is internally female (and vice versa). Approximately one in two thousand people are intersex, which translates into about 3 million people in the world.

Read Full Post »

Inherently Brief: Volume 22

Snapshots of law, gender and sexuality news from the past couple of weeks

UN Women Ad Campaign Shows Pervasive Sexism

Lauren Posada

Recently, UN Women has launched an ad campaign, created by Memac Ogilvy and Mather Dubai, which shows the extent of worldwide sexism and discrimination against women. Using the Google search bar, UN Women inputted the beginning of sentences such as “women shouldn’t”, and put the drop down options over women’s mouths. While shocking, a quick check of Google shows that these are in fact true. Arwa Mahdawi, writing for the Guardian, warns us against taking the campaign too literally and notes that “autocomplete isn’t always an entirely accurate reflection of the collective psyche”. Whilst this may be true, and no doubt Google does come up with some questionable autocomplete answers at times, it is undeniably disturbing to see these searches from a world widely used search engine. Whilst perhaps the searches are not reflective of all of humanity, the adverts are definitely thought provoking and lead us to question how far equality between the genders has actually progressed.

Read Full Post »